UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor: Investigate the Possibility that Israel is Committing the Crime of Genocide Against the Palestinian People

Eurovision is a mere example of how Israel is desperately trying to gain legitimacy through a stubborn insistence on old myths and the almost comical exhaustion of the same talking points. Because Zionism is a modern colonial movement that is incompatible with universal human rights and international law, and because Israel does not have any moral or legal justification for the colonization of Palestine and for the genocidal maltreatment of Palestinians, the Israeli regime will continue to desperately necessitate absurd propaganda in its efforts to narrate to the outside world, and probably to itself, a modified version of history, trying to prove that it has some sort of legitimacy.

In the scholarly world we call these movements settler colonialism. We distinguish between them and colonialism, because the settler colonialists are intent on destroying and eliminating the natives. And I think that’s what happened in Palestine.

… It is this story, of Palestinian dispossession, ethnic cleansing, and an ongoing process of what Pappe has termed “incremental genocide”, which for genuine activists, zionism represents. [47:15]

Since Israel’s origin, the state has dispossessed countless Palestinians through violent means, starting with the 1948 al-Nakba (“The Catastrophe”) in which nearly a million indigenous Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homes or otherwise murdered by Zionist militias. The U.S. shares a common history with Israel as a fellow settler-colonial project rooted in genocide, making the countries’ current close relationship unsurprising.

Dehumanization is a common tactic all colonizers and settler-colonizers have been using throughout human history. All colonizers and genocidal regimes convince themselves (and all the bystanders out there) that they are not committing any crime, that in killing millions of their fellow human beings they are in fact doing something virtuous, essential and even godly. It is necessary to dehumanize victims so the job of harming, killing and displacing them is not only made easier but is in fact possible at all. Most people would not harm one another when they feel empathy and relate to each other’s experience… We see one such case unfolding in Palestine right in front of our noses and no one is doing anything about it.

Back in 2012 I wrote a short book entitled Cultural Genocide (Rutgers University Press). It looked at four case studies of this phenomenon: the American Indians, Russian treatment of Jews in the 19th century, Chinese assimilation of Tibet, and Israel’s ongoing treatment of the Palestinians. It is an aspect of Palestinian plight that I want to revisit here.

The idea behind cultural genocide is relatively simple—it is the systematic erasure of the culture of indigenous people subject to colonization.

Intersectionality is vested in a shared experience of racial subjugations, humiliation, and exploitation. But even if those connections didn’t abundantly exist, it would still not justify the ethnic supremacy, settler colonial genocide and racial segregation that Israel inflicts on Palestinians.

Even if it didn’t exist, it wouldn’t justify wholesale torture of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. And even if black, Latino, Native, and LGBTQ populations didn’t already identify with Palestine, it still wouldn’t justify the bombardment of the starving, impoverished masses of Gaza, resulting in the deaths of thousands of innocents, including my four-year-old cousin Deema Isleem, who was incinerated in her father’s arms, to clear the land for racially exclusive settlement.

Whereas the colonial nature of Jerusalem Light Festival is “light”… the actions and graffiti of [Price Tag] can hardly be more overt. The Graffiti constitutes a more extreme and genocidal formal aesthetic violence, reflecting and foreshadowing actual acts of brutality.

… The colonial practice of marking, of stripping, and maiming the body, through various modes of sensory violence demonstrates that the colonised city is a space of exterminability.

Genocide studies are at a cross-road. In June 2016, the InternationalNetwork of Genocide Scholars, sponsor of the Journal of Genocide Research, imperilled the future of genocide studies by aligning itself with Zionist Israel, which many scholars consider to be a genocidal settler-colonial perpetrator state. Almost at the same time, Damien Short’s important intervention Redefining Genocide was published, suggesting new directions for genocide studies in the Anthropocene and featuring Palestine as one of its case studies. In considering historical and ongoing genocides in Palestine, Sri Lanka, and Australia, Redefining Genocide inspires a rethinking of the relationship between genocide, settler-colonialism, and the state.

Just recently, Ecuadorian envoy to the United Nations, Horacio Sevilla was adamant in his comments before a UN session, marking November 29 as the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. After he rejected “with all our strength the persecution and genocide [unleashed by] Nazism against the Hebrew people,” he added, “But I cannot remember anything more similar in our contemporary history than the eviction, persecution and genocide that today imperialism and Zionism do against the Palestinian people”. Sevilla was not comparing ideologies per se – Zionism vs. Nazism – but rather the practical implications of these political ideologies: Eviction (as in ethnic cleansing), persecution and genocide.

… The Ecuadorian diplomat’s comparison is not new, but is an echo of a constant stream of criticism of Israel, its military practices and its political ideology, namely Zionism. Yet in most, if not all, of these instances, there is yet to be an open, intelligent discussion, involving Israeli itself, regarding the applicability of such comparisons.